


Not Falling Far From the Tree

by goldenslumber



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Eloping, F/M, Inaccurate, Silly, runaways - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-04 23:07:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenslumber/pseuds/goldenslumber
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jaime and Brienne have faced numerous battles together - outlaws, bears, the undead... but the hardest battle is yet to come in the form of their teenage daughter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Falling Far From the Tree

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt at -- JaimeBrienne.org -- Enjoy.

The first person to hear from her is Arya.  
  
A maester brings the worn letter with the seal of the Twins pressed into the front of it straight to Jaime. It was obvious by the way the old man's breath was catching and his cheek were pink from running through the halls of Casterly Rock, that it was what the lord had been waiting for.  
  
 _News._  
  
Someone has found her.  
  
Jaime rips the letter from the man's fingers and tears open the seal. “When?” he asks.  
  
“Just now. The raven had another note on its foot. Lady Stark says that she was there for two nights, at the Twins.”  
  
“She went to the Northern kingdom?”  
  
“It seems so.” Jaime nods and dismisses the maester with a hand, then turns to the rest of the bannermen. They all watch him expectantly as he reads. When he is done his face is tight and unreadable. “Go for the day, I have no need of you.” The bannermen follow him out the doors and watch him disappear down a different hall.  
  
His footsteps echo against the stone walls as he hurries along. The letter is clutched in his fist and he takes the shortest path he know to the nursery, where more often than not, he can find Brienne.  
  
She's got their son at a breast and Joanna is running about the room. The girl of seven grins at the sight of her father. Jaime barely notes the act of picking her up and placing her on his left hip. She clings to his shoulders.  
  
Brienne lifts her head, almost smiling, except she knows his face. Her expression is serious. “There's been news.”  
  
Jaime nods. “She's gone to the Twins.”  
  
“Arya..”  
  
“Yes. It was smart of her. Sansa would have trapped her and waited until we came to get her.”  
  
Jaime offers Brienne the letter and waits as she situates herself better. Duncan, an infant, whimpers when she clumsy laces her shirt over her breasts and sets him in her lap. His fists grasp incoherently at Brienne until she cradles him on a shoulder and his face is at her neck. It takes her three minutes to absorb the words of the letter and she is not quite frowning. “She's run off with Robb.”  
  
Jaime bounces Jo slightly, sighing wearily. “Arya and Gendry are not happy that our daughter has stolen their heir.”  
  
“Robb stole ours, too,” Brienne reminds him. His wife watches him carefully. She knows it's coming, that flash of guilt in his face. She's seen it plenty enough. “Stop.”  
  
“Stop what?”  
  
“Stop blaming yourself.”  
  
“It's my fault! It's not safe out there,” Jaime insists. “A girl seven-and-ten should not be living the life of a hedge knight.”  
  
That irked Brienne for a moment. “She can do whatever she likes.”  
  
“She's trying to get Arya's son to start a war!”  
  
“Robb is smart enough not to listen to Nila.”  
  
“Robb has gone with her. They were at the sept! Didn't you get to that part?”  
  
“I skimmed it.”  
  
“You don't care?” he asks. “At all? Our daughter is out there, all alone, sleeping in the dirt.”  
  
She knows this is bad news, not just for them, by a lot of things. And perhaps, Jaime isn't overreacting, but she knows that he is driving his worry off of the guilt and she has to defuse it. “We have two perfectly fine children here to watch out for.”   
  
Jaime's eyes drop to his infant son in her arms. “I know that.”  
  
More defusing; “She's not alone, she's with Robb. At the end of the letter it said they were going to the Iron Islands, and there isn't much dirt up there, but rock and salt water. So she's likely not sleeping in it. That aside, she has a sword, good money, a Lannister name... for any sake, she has a Stark with her. They're in the North. What could possibly happen to them?”  
  
All of that is true. Jaime knows it's true. But she still sees the guilt in his eyes.  
  
“Stop blaming yourself.”  
  
“I can't.”  
  
“She'll come home eventually.”  
  
“She never would have left if it weren't for me.”  
  
Duncan makes a sound and Brienne pulls him closer. Jaime looks despairingly at the boy. “Think he'll hate me, too?”  
  
Jo, who listens rapidly at his side, kisses her father's cheek. “I love you.”  
  
Brienne feels the tug of a smile, as Jaime slings another arm around the girl and pulls her closer. “I know you do,” he tells her, but there is anxiety written in his every feature. His eyes are still on Brienne's. “The Iron Islands are not in the domain of the King of the North, nor the Iron Throne. There is still bad blood between Stark and Greyjoy.”  
  
“Yes,” Brienne agrees simply.  
  
Jaime narrows his eyes. “You don't believe they are going there.”  
  
“I don't.”  
  
“Where else?”  
  
“Possibly the Wall.”  
  
“And I sent all my men to search for Nila in the Reach.”  _I keep making mistakes_ , he thinks.  
  
They are in silence for a long while. Eventually Jo gets too squirmy and Jaime puts her down. He watches her go and wonders if she will be like Nila. Joanna is more a lady than Nila ever wanted to be. Though it is odd, because Jo is thicker and looks more like Brienne, and Nila is undoubtedly their prettiest child; as tall as her mother, agile as her father, Lannister face and hair, freckles, dimples and a broad smile made of crooked teeth. Regret spread once more through him remembering her.  
  
“Stop torturing yourself,” Brienne tells him when he slumps into a chair next to hers. “Nila loves you. She was upset, but Robb will calm her down and they'll come back, you'll see.”  
  
“And if she doesn't?”  
  
“Then I advise you not to make the same mistake with Joanna. She's almost eight now, and if she's anything like Nila, if you try to marry her off, she'll run just as far.”  
  
“I merely suggested a marriage,” Jaime sighs. “She ran before I finished.”  
  
“You pushed that Tyrell boy right into her.”  
  
“ _Pushed_  is such a harsh word.”  
  
“I was there.”  
  
“I saw you there.”  
  
“And I saw you push him right into Nila.”  
  
“He tripped.”  
  
Brienne grunts, looks down at the infant, and hums, “I hope your lying doesn't pass down.”  
  
“Already has. Nila is probably in Braavos right now. Married to the Stark.”  
  
“Are you objecting?”  
  
“No. Not really. Robb is just..”  
  
Brienne gives him a carefully sharp look. “Robb is the one she chose.”  
  
 _He's wild, like her,_  Jaime thinks. “Better than Sansa's brood, I suppose.”  
  
“Or those Tyrells,” Brienne murmurs, almost too quiet for Jaime to catch. “Promise me that you won't do this to Jo.”  
  
“I won't.”  
  
“And Duncan?”  
  
Jaime throws up his hands and runs them through his hair in agitation. “I wasn't even going to make the match, I was only flirting with the option. With Tyrion in King's Landing Margery wanted her son well connected and her son is around Nila's age..” He shakes his head. “I only wanted them to look at each other, then Nila went and turned into you, too stubborn to deal with, emotional...”  
  
“Rumor is she tried to steal your sword.”  
  
“Didn't happen.”  
  
“Curious, because Oathkeeper is no longer hanging in the study.”  
  
Jaime hadn't thought to check; he sits up and makes as though to rise, but then he overlooks Brienne, noting the calm in her eyes, the deft way she pats the infant's back. “You still don't care,” he says.  
  
“No.”  
  
“I'm too old for this,” Jaime decides. He looks at Brienne and sees that she looks younger than him, a lot younger, despite her ruined cheek. “They are coming here,” he finally addresses. “To discuss how the marriage effects things.”  
  
“Loyalty,” Brienne says immediately.  
  
“Aye.”  
  
“Dowry?”  
  
“They don't need money. Arya doesn't want to come. Gendry is loathe to leave without her, so he'll drag her along, and their young one. Her bannermen are loyal, though, they'll watch the Twins in her absence. The only person who might insist she take the money is Rickon, in Winterfell. He'll want the gold.”  
  
Brienne is less inclined toward politics and the games in them, than even Jaime. “Will there be a fight?” That's all she cares for.  
  
“I don't know. There have been no high-born marriages between the new kingdoms.” They know that Dorne wants nothing to do with the North or Westeros (basically everything but the North and Dorne), and they will not care for the new marriage. Others, however, from Storm's End and King's Landing and the Reach.. they will quarrel over this. It gets into the question that if Westeros goes to war with the North, where would the Lannisters stand if they have a daughter that might one day be Lady of the Twins? Who inconveniently would be the watcher of the Neck, and married into the Starks, the son of Arya, who had already threatened war when she took the Twins, murdering every Frey she could find.  
  
Jaime's head aches with all the tangled webs. Of course, it was his teenage daughter who did this.  
  
“Perhaps they won't come back.”  _Is that hope in her voice?_  “They will disappear and enjoy the life of a hedge knight together.”  
  
“They're still who they are. She's a Lannister. He's a Stark. No one will forget. They won't do that.”  
  
“Nila is a romantic..”  _Like someone else I know,_  Brienne thinks to herself. “..she might just do it, to get herself a story, or herself a song.”  
  
“There are already stories.”  
  
Duncan is asleep by then and Brienne rises from her seat. Jaime watches her put the boy to bed. “Then let hers be a happy one,” she murmurs, drawing a sheet over the infant.  _Let there be a happy story somewhere in this world_ , is the unspoken truth.  
  
  
Eight days later, the Starks are there. They move swiftly through the land, because they are a small party, and there is no train to haul; the 'lady' of the house prefers horseback, just as much as her companions. Brienne comes out in her mail to greet the woman. Arya looks well, in her place. More lord than lady, with her sword-belt and her unruly hair. She smiles at Brienne – they are more alike than Sansa and Brienne ever were.  
  
Once proper greetings are put aside, Brienne starts, “Your son–”  
  
Arya laughs there. “ –is like me. He doesn't listen well, no more than yours.”  
  
Gendry comes to her side, dismounting, a hulking figure compared to this thin wife. “He tried to set the sable afire when he was ten, and now this..” he shrugs, smiling adoringly at Arya, who shrugs off his hand on her shoulder. “She was always looking for fights. Especially with people bigger than her.”  
  
“Robb just likes to take on kingdoms that are bigger than him,” Jaime smirks, coming to join them on the steps of Casterly Rock. He rests a light hand on his wench's lower back. This one is not shrugged off, but leaned into. There have been too many years between them – and Jaime got the faint feeling, eventually, that would be the same story for the two standing in front of him.  
  
Arya and Gendry's younger son, four, at the most, sits boredly in his mother's saddle, where she left him.  
  
One of the servants scolds Arya in a glance, for her mothering skills. Brienne eyes smile, and she watches Jo introduce herself to the child. “Might be well to keep them apart, don't want another pair, do we?” Jaime suggests.  
  
It was true, Brienne had let Nila be with Robb for far too long when they were children. No one moves.  
  
Everyone stalls for a moment. Arya finally speaks, “Nila was with us for two nights. I saw her only once, though.”  
  
“Robb snuck her in and hid her well,” Gendry supplies.  
  
“Was she well?” Brienne asks.  
  
Arya shrugs. “The same as ever, I suppose.”  
  
“Did she say anything?”  
  
“Only that I should mind my own business.”  
  
A faint smile. “She is more Jaime, than me.”  
  
“I don't agree,” Arya says. “She's quite a lot of you, with the way she wears mail and carries a sword.”  
  
A pause. “Oathkeeper?”  
  
“The very same,” Gendry says. “I know Valyrian steel, sheathed or not.”  
  
Arya overlooks the castle uneasily. She glances at her son and the Lannister girl and frowns and looks back at Brienne. “Why did Nila leave Casterly Rock?”   
  
“Because we tried to marry her off.”  
  
Arya jerks her chin into a nod. “I would have done the same.”  
  
“Aye,” Brienne murmurs. “Me, too.”  
  
Their husbands remain silent, ignored.  
  
A bastard and a cripple.  
  
It's a good thing their wenches love them so much.  
  
In the end, over dinner, they come to agree that their teenagers were possibly their most difficult trial in life.


End file.
